Firewatch is about solitude and space, a first-person journey through the massive wilderness of America’s Shoshone National Forest. It’s a space of such magnitude that it almost unavoidably conjures mysteries and conspiracies of corresponding size. But in this game, we are drawn back down to the essential and human.

You are Henry.

This is how it all starts, in the second person like a choose your own adventure book, although the opening prologue is more like a multiple choice quiz sketching the history of Henry’s heartbreaking early adulthood. You meet a girl. Life happens. There are moments of extraordinary joy, giving way to an overall theme of devastation. Henry decides to escape, to a job as a fire lookout at Shoshone National Forest.

Firewatch is a relatively small game that projects itself big. Made by a new studio of about a dozen people, Firewatch is stylised and almost cartoonish, its visual grasp of the American outdoors defined by the bright, airbrushed work of British artist Olly Moss. The park is an open world, with tantalising views of distant peaks and valleys stretching much further than the game’s explorable area. It’s a world that delivers both variety – of colour, landscape, time of day – and sophistication within a dense, well-plotted space, its modest map efficiently filled with items, pathways and objectives.

Firewatch is about what happens to Henry in the park, after the emotional foundation laid by the prologue. And what happens, really, is two things: he meets – or rather doesn’t meet – Delilah, a perky, forthright and funny lookout supervisor who is both exactly what Henry needs to trigger his emotional recuperation, and also his boss. She works in a distant cabin on one of those tantalising far-off peaks, a warm voice floating into Henry’s ear through his lookout walkie-talkie, an absence in the physical space around him underlining his solitude.

Firewatch’s visual grasp of the American outdoors is defined by the bright, airbrushed work of British artist Olly Moss. Photograph: Campo Santo

The other thing that happens is that Henry and Delilah become entangled in a slowly unfolding mystery, which grows from a simple infraction of park rules – kids letting off fireworks – to a paranoid, all-consuming plot. This mystery motivates all of Henry’s tasks and movements: he’ll talk to Delilah, she’ll send him somewhere, he’ll explore the park, complications typically ensue.

The journey, though, is more important than the destination. Everything that happens to Henry in the park is designed to highlight his vulnerabilities. With his life paused and broken, his increasing dependence on Delilah begins to feel like an emotional precipice, the skewed power dynamic and his fragility a tinderbox mix. Meanwhile, the park itself envelopes him physically, this stocky, everyday nobody tumbling through the oblivious vastness of this wild place.

And it works. Which is to say that we care, and that Henry feels like us. The writing is not just believable, it is likeable and funny. Henry and Delilah’s exchanges are full of the familiar tug and tarry of people getting to know each other, of playing and of flirting, and of reaching out to feel less alone. Henry’s sadsack dryness – by turns curt, dopey and earnest – isn’t just endearing, it’s endearingly realistic. His words sound like something we might say, which makes the dialogue choices the game offers all the more effective. It’s a matter of investment, even if we’re not deciding anything crucial, we buy it. We’re in.

It also works because Firewatch delivers a good sense of being a small person in a huge space. The wind howls as you climb the winding stairs to the top of your lookout tower. There’s a boy scout survivalism to walking the park; every point to which Delilah sends Henry he must find with a map and compass he holds in front of his face. He picks up supplies and ropes from locked cache drops – there’s a subtle sense that the regular safety net of games (slick digital map screens and GPS waypoints) has been removed, and Henry has to stay alert to stay alive. [Potential spoiler alert] In the second half of the game, as the mystery Henry’s investigating deepens, a fire starts to spread in the distance. It’s visible from Henry’s tower – glowing, hungry, uncontrollable – and it grows into an all-consuming force. [Spoiler ends]

There are things Firewatch doesn’t quite deliver, though. There are glimpses of the complexity of a puzzle game – with its items, for instance, which can be picked up, moved and examined – that it doesn’t quite follow through with. Early on, dealing with those kids and their fireworks, Henry can pick up their stereo and then, though the game doesn’t specifically suggest it, it’s possible to throw it into the lake. There’s a thrill to knowing the game has anticipated this leftfield choice, something reminiscent of the obscurities and intuitions of classic PC adventure games, and something Firewatch doesn’t do again.

This touches on a bigger question of interaction and involvement. The walking simulator question. Games falling into this category have tried various things to add complexity to the basic process of moving through an area and receiving story. Firewatch uses branching dialogue and tactile objects and items (the walkie-talkie, the map, dozens of small nothings) to give players a handhold in the experience. It feels like it could gate progression by building puzzles using these items, but instead we’re very much led, albeit skilfully, through the game’s world. Time is elastic, according to the needs of story. Days and even weeks are skipped over. Sometimes, with a plot point reached, days simply end while Henry is wandering in the open. And why not? It’s effective storytelling, but it also underlines that Firewatch is moved forward by player discovery, rather than player activity.

All of which means that Firewatch does what it sets out to do – it tells a simple, effective story using its keenly developed sense of location and by binding us to Henry through smart writing and dialogue choices. The question of whether these choices can substantially impact the outcome of Henry’s story does niggle: were we just witnesses or active participants?

However, Firewatch’s final few minutes provide a rush of revelation and reconciliation that caps a triumphant and involving piece of emotional storytelling. It is, in the end, like a choose your own adventure book, played without dice or fighting. You are Henry. And you’re glad you played Firewatch.

Note: while we experienced no technical issues with our version of the Firewatch code, several other reviewers have mentioned significant frame rate slowdown and animation problems with the PS4 version. We’ll investigate this further.